29 Comments

At first, I found the whole psychosexual theme silly and a bit annoying, but I'm glad I stuck with the post because I found myself laughing out loud through most of it. I do like me some black humor, and it's hard to derive any from this otherwise incredibly grim and morbid affair. Seeing Putin photoshopped in the style of T-shirt we used to refer to as "wife-beater" when I was a kid was the icing on the cake.

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Thanks. I was certainly laughing as I wrote it. My Irish instinct is to blunt the tragic with humour which is why I emphasized the tragic aspects of the war in the beginning and end. The "wife-beater" t-shirt was very intentional! I have a lot of readers whose first language is not English so I am never quite sure how much of the more subtle hints are getting across. The whole psychosexual thing fell into place so easily that I just went with it. It seems people really enjoy it or hate it!

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Idiotic commentary.

Ukraine was not the passive - it was the one fan dancing between the West and Russia.

Abusive ex-husbands don't have to bribe the ex-wives.

On the other hand, abusive actual husbands are the ones beating the wives - has Ukraine suffered more actual loss under Western "guidance" than under Russia's? Or its own?

But even beyond these sad and tortured metaphors, Ukraine is the one that has allowed a violent, fascist unelected minority to hijack Ukrainian national policy in order to promote said minority's ideological agenda - which is what tipped the balance from Ukraine being the fan dancer to being an abused proxy - and one that is in the process of being abandoned in favor of the "hotter girl" of Israel/attacking Iran.

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I think we are in violent agreement. The opening scene was meant to convey the loss Ukraine has suffered as a result of their "actual husband." In fairness to the Ukrainian people, in the 2019 Election they rejected (except two regions in Galicia) the neo-Nazi oligarch Poroshenko in favour of the comedic oligarch Zelensky, who promised peace with Russia. Just goes to show that 'If voting made any difference they wouldn't let us do it.'

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Quite true.

I should have made it clear that the idiotic commentary is that coming from the West and Ukraine itself, not you.

As for the voting: the piano hand-man was elected based on all manner of fuckery and lies to start with. For example: the TV show was carefully of the same name as piano hand-man's political party - specifically so that ads for the TV show were not violating political ad prohibitions on road signs.

None of this was a secret.

For all the false talk about Trump being a Manchurian candidate - piano hand-man is the actual Manchurian candidate... originally of one oligarch, then the West.

That's on them (the Ukrainian people).

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Language language language

If you are pretending to reason or to the rational do not use that loosely slangy expletive ey and fakery names calling for those you claim to dislike

Why not provide some rationale or means for the Ukrainian people, as for the US or the EU peoples, to throw off your/their equally corrupt and authoritarian leaders and degraded and exploitative social political economic system

Easy to rant about the Ukraine, show some evidence you can look after your own

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20 October 2024 KB Ukraine

War and depopulation –

Your article does raise the issue of the Ukraine depopulation ‘experiment’ deliberately enacted by sectors of the US ruling class

More likely they stumbled into it than planned it, but this reflects a running streak in US attitudes to other countries, especially Russia and China, one which boots up their inherent sense of exceptionalism and indeed ‘destiny’

Please find links to a fairly hard headed appreciation of fertility rate decline, which underscores the military consequences of such for any allies that might not yet feel inclined to address this problem

Otherwise response in the US to those who raise such concerns is dismissive in the trivial style, as per Biden, to invoke the endless stream of immigrants beating down the door

Otherwise the reversion is to ideology, to woman’s rights, to the sacred individual right to chose, to freedom, to have fun and so on

And to curse ‘birthers’ as Trumpist and worse

However endless immigration is only achieved on the back of US power to keep much of Latin and South America in deprivation and chaos, which power is waning, while even there populations are declining

And among European ruling classes the fear of increased and overwhelming numbers of Africans, due to Russia control over Sahel and Libya migration routes, is beginning to take hold

Nobody has a clue – except perhaps the Russians and the Chinese – but the articles make clear quite how very difficult it is going to be to reverse fertility rate declines and to not be faced with greatly increased African immigration from a continent that may increase it’s population to some 4B this century

« Demographic disaster may have an unappreciated upside’

April 14 2024

https://asiatimes.com/2024/04/demographic-disaster-may-have-an-unappreciated-upside/

‘The economic way to reverse demographic decline’

Sept 14 2024

https://asiatimes.com/2024/09/the-economic-way-to-reverse-demographic-decline/

« East better than West for pro-natalist engineering »

Sept 17 2024 Icabod Asia Times

https://asiatimes.com/2024/09/east-better-than-west-for-pro-natalist-engineering/

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This is a subject that I am deeply interested in. It's refreshing to read those articles with concrete proposals to deal with demographic decline. One other aspect is the urban / rural divide. Historically, urban areas don't reproduce themselves and rely on rural areas for both food and the next generation. But with rampant urbanisation the rural areas are not able to keep up with the demographic side of their burden. Perhaps with the renewed interest in healthy food, along with AI and automation, there will be movement back towards rural areas and a more traditional style of life?

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21 Octo 2024 KB Fertility rates

Dear KB as I have seen on Simplicius’s website

The western discussions of this decline have in some cases been intelligent, but very few people have realised quite how deep and quick this decline will be over the next few decades

I like to laugh at them by pointing out that just as it all started from out of Africa, that one and all came from here, this is how it will end

The Chinese have come up with a solution which seems natural enough, to treat having children as part of the reproduction of the means of production, which is the traditional approach in Africa still, and which, as far my limited knowledge goes, is in line with Mao ist thought

Even in Central Africa, even in the far backwoods, the internet and the pervasive images of the western world are completing the work of the various régimes to centralise and ‘modernise’ and to move people off the land to the cities, to update/replace the traditional commons, better to control and to leave place for ind ag or mineral extraction

All so called green politics, anti deforestation, and their financial derivatives, land ‘right’s, carbon offset etc schemes have encouraged the ruling class to perform in this way

So even here the birth rate is declining, the gender wars are installing themselves

I know not about developed economies, but it seems that China and FOCAC are attempting some sort of emphasis on the traditional/collective which may lead to rural solutions of the birth rate and rural life without too many of the accessories of western consumerisms

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I did not include some links to authors you are probably familiar with, notably Philip Pilkington

https://thepeoplesvoice.tv/population-collapse-looming-in-greece-as-sudden-deaths-soar-and-fertility-hits-record-low/

https://nitter.poast.org/MoreBirths

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/11/capitalisms-overlooked-contradiction-wealth-and-demographic-decline/

Crises of Elite Competition in the East and West

By Malcom Kyeyune and Marty MacMarty

https://t.co/CKxhhfnU0g

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Thanks, I'll check these out. I've been reading Phillip for more than a decade and I'm very pleased he has taken on the demographic issue. He's also Irish and so it must be so shocking to see such a decline in birth rates in such a short period of time.

One interesting source on this is Elizabeth Warren's book "The Two Income Trap." She wrote it back when she was still LARPing as an Oklahoma republican but it is is brilliant book that explains the bad consequences that sending both parents into the workplace had on middle class standards of living.

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Yes indeed - briefly

... the drive to employ women is based on the appetite for increasing the corporate work force at the expense of the remaining areas of life out of the reach of capitalist corporate control

Thereby imposing consumerist and certifiable hiercharchical ising addictions on women which overcome any desires or emotions which may be staisfied without indulgence, public show or recognition

US middle class women in corporate - one I remember was surprised when I asked her about her vacations : to reply-- a week sometimes at best and how hard/impossible it was to co ordinate them with her equally corporate husband's

Just because life on the farm follows the rhythms of nature and does not respect corporate calender or conformity

Guy Debord says that time, agricultural time and bourgeois time, are at odds, for high fertility rates pre agricultural time is required

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Yes, I was thinking last night that the Chinese approach outlined in those articles is a form of "demographic Fordism" where the means of reproduction are rationalized and benefit from an economy of scale. My Irish mother was one of ten children and grew up in a tiny house in a city and so such large families are not at all unusual. In the end the important thing is to have children but I think I prefer a more artisanal approach with family sizes from four to six. There is a lot of cultural deprograming that will need to happen to turn the demographic boat in the right direction.

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Well ……this rationalisation, the imperative to reproduce the means of production, is age old and practiced until this day in Central Africa, alhough 10 to 15 children is no longer common, 5 or 8 is

One can update this and regiment in the way the China programs suggest – what is difficult is to supply the rationale or the sense of neccessity, when all around speaks of the triumph of the will over nature

The current debate in Italy about surrogacy seems to ignore the basic elements of any understanding of the problems involved – here babies as commercial consumer products to be ordered via catalogue from any part of the globe which takes their fancy would appear accepted, baubles to be put on display, while leaving the nurturing to another import from another part of the globe

The Central A avoid this by communalising everything – infertile, underfertile women or agey mothers merely redistribute babies throughout the family or village

PP says, I am sure he is right, that the problem can not be solved, can not even be presented, under capitalism

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PP is right. A sub-system more akin to Distributism, where property is fragmented and held by families, will be a necessary condition to really start addressing the demographic crisis.

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Thank you for this

PP is very much right on this issue, as on others

You should interview him!

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The staggering demographic decline of Ukrainians is the ultimate defeat of those far right nationalist Ukrainians who fomented this war. They are losing what was the most precious to them.

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Ukrainian leaders made the mistake back in 2013-2014 of believing ghouls like Victoria Nuland and idiots like John McCain.

The D.C. foreign policy blob has never cared about Ukraine as anything other than a tool to hurt Russia.

The Ukrainian leadership should have known that from the beginning. Desk jockeys in D.C. want to fight till the last Ukrainian.

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Very true. I had actually transcribed McCain and Graham's speech to Ukrainian troops from December 2016 for this piece but I didn't manage to fit it in. Graham has now ascended to the position of being the ghoulish of all of them.

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Graham is another ghoul. He has stated publicly that using U.S. weapons to kill Russians in Ukraine is one of the most important things we’re doing.

I guess fixing our country is pretty low down his list of priorities, and all those dead Slavs are just the cost of doing business for guys like him

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I write essays every month on Ukraine and I love this analogy. It literally sums it up.

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Thank you!

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So, apart from organising a coup against an elected president, installing a puppet government in its place, buiding-up the strongest army in Europe, poking the Bear, inciting the Ukrainian Nationalists to attack the Russian speaking population in Donbas, encouraging the move to join NATO, thereby crossing countless Russian red lines laid down over mnay years, arming them to the teeth, and then enouraging the manhood of an entire generation to die in a hopeless war, and then deciding that this insanity must continue to the last Ukrainian. Whilst profiteeing their MIC, and exposing none of their own men to join in the fight and be sent back to their loved ones in boxes...In the words of Monty Python: WHAT HAVE THE AMERICANS EVER DONE FOR US?

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This script deserves more views. Thank you Kevin

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Thanks and I agree. The post not doing so well and I lost nearly ten subscriptions in reeaction to it. Oh well, I enjoyed writing it so there is that!

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Analogies are never quite apt, but good imagery here, lol. 'Crazy Ex' is right.

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True. But once I got going it sort of started writing itself. I'm of both Irish and Slavic descent and so my Irish side cannot resist tempering tragedy with humour!

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Excellent, true. If one has to try to predict the future, one has to start from this excellent article.

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Thank you!

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